1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to automatic identification, automatic data capture, and data storage technology, specifically, optical encoding.
2. Description of Related Art
Monochromatic barcodes and “2D” barcodes or portable data files, such as the Symbol PDF417 code, are known. But these symbologies uniformly suffer from extremely small information capacity per unit of area, i.e., information density.
Multicolor barcode solutions have been proposed in recognition of the potential for exponentially higher information density than the monochromatic approach allows. See, e.g., Saito, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2002/0066786 and related applications (hereinafter, collectively called “Saito”); Harrison, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2003/0209604 (hereinafter, “Harrison II”); see, also, Harrison, U.S. Patent Publication 2003/0193842 (using light phenomena to indicate time) (hereinafter, “Harrison I”).
However, with the exceptions of Harrison I and II, these proposed polychromatic solutions are not ideal in that they suffer from:                low tolerance for suboptimal conditions (e.g., imperfect lighting at the time of decoding, imperfect printing)        lack of a comprehensive symbology for polychromatism        failure to recognize or overcome the inherent limitations of additive coding        rigidity: non-customizability of symbolic relationships        information density and usability levels that are not compelling enough to create new markets or to ward off encroachment from competing solutions that offer other advantages, e.g., RFID        inability to tailor barcode appearance to fashion and branding needs        lack of high-level integration: failure to move beyond isolated building-blocks to fully deployable solutions        inability to provide password protection for information in barcodes        
Harrison I and II, meanwhile, fail to disclose a compound matrix structure, a command sequence reference mechanism, and numerous other novel features of the present invention.
What is needed, therefore, is a barcode or portable data file solution that (i) offers information density levels that are many times greater than those available under the most effective related art; (ii) is effective in diverse optical and commercial settings; (iii) is infinitely customizable; and (iv) otherwise overcomes many of the limiting factors that plague related art solutions.
It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a fully integrated, polychromatic optical encoding solution which simultaneously achieves both unprecedented information density and a high degree of usability so that the system can be deployed under a wide variety of conditions.
The following definitions from Webopedia.com may be useful:                “Pantone Matching System (PMS): A popular color matching system used by the printing industry to print spot colors. Most applications that support color printing allow you to specify colors by indicating the Pantone name or number. This assures that you get the right color when the file is printed, even though the color may not look right when displayed on your monitor. PMS works well for spot colors but not for process colors, which are generally specified using the CMYK color model.”        “color matching: The process of assuring that a color on one medium remains the same when converted to another medium. This is extremely difficult because different media use different color models. Color monitors, for example, use the RGB model, whereas process printing uses the CMYK model. As color desktop publishing matures, color matching is gaining more and more attention. The most recent Windows and Macintosh operating systems include a color management system (CMS) to assist in color matching.”        “spot color: Refers to a method of specifying and printing colors in which each color is printed with its own ink. In contrast, process color printing uses four inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to produce all other colors. Spot color printing is effective when the printed matter contains only one to three different colors, but it becomes prohibitively expensive for more colors. Most desktop publishing and graphics applications allow you to specify spot colors for text and other elements. There are a number of color specification systems for specifying spot colors, but Pantone is the most widely used.”        “process colors: Refers to the CMYK color model used in offset printing.”        “CMYK: Short for Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black . . . . CMYK is a color model in which all colors are described as a mixture of these four process colors. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents. Because such printing uses inks of these four basic colors, it is often called four-color printing. In contrast, display devices generally use a different color model called RGB, which stands for Red-Green-Blue. One of the most difficult aspects of desktop publishing in color is color matching—properly converting the RGB colors into CMYK colors so that what gets printed looks the same as what appears on the monitor.”        
Numerous distinct technologies from distinct industries are also relevant to the present disclosure, including: color matching systems, such as those used to scan housepaint samples of an unknown color so as to produce a matching batch of paint; data processing equipment, including computers, and all related hardware and software, such as monitors, printers, scanners, spectrophotometers, database management software, and Web server and browser software; operating systems (the present invention is OS-agnostic) and programming, markup, scripting, and database query languages; color analysis and management hardware and software; automatic data capture hardware and software, particularly optical; and remaining relevant technologies. All documents which, as of the time of this writing, may be found through www.google.com, www.wikipedia.org, or www.yahoo.com are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure in their entirety for the purpose of informing the reader about these and all other relevant technologies.